We left Norman, OK at 1:30pm and headed towards Graham, TX. When we got to Graham we sat there for about two hours and waited for something to fire. Around 6pm the first storm fired bear Breckenridge, TX and headed east from there. We decided to drive towards it since it was the only storm out there and in no time the storm died. However, shortly after it died another storm fired in Breckenridge and quickly gained strength. The storm was moving directly east at less than 10 Kts. The storm quickly turned into a supercell and began to take more of a ESE direction. We drove down near Necessity, TX and were looking for a place to set up so we could watch the storm move directly at us. While driving down state highway 16 we saw the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) sitting on a road that said it was closed. We did not want to head any farther west because we would have headed right into the core, which had softball size hail with it. We decided to follow the TIV down the closed road and in the process drove around several road closed signs that said the bridge was out ahead. Turns out, the bridge was intact! We drove down the road a ways more and found a perfect spot to stop and watch a massive rotating wall cloud less than 150 yards from us! The area where we had stopped was in the path of the inflow and just to the SSE of the storm.
As we were taking pictures of the storm and watching the wall cloud cycle, hail started to fall. We immediately got back into the car to sit the hail storm out. First the hail was quarter size, then golf ball size, then nearly tennis ball size! This was by far the largest hail that I have ever been in. About 3 minutes later the hail came to a stop and we grabbed a few pieces and took pictures (shown below). We ended up getting ahead of the storm one more time, but by this time it was quickly dying out. This was the best looking supercell I have ever personally seen, and yet, it never even went tor-warned.
On the way home we stopped to grab a bite to eat when I noticed that I had a hold in my driver’s door! A piece of hail went clean through the plastic piece located directly under the door handle. Luckily this door handle was already broken so I am not even going to bother fixing it. We ended up about an hour southwest of Dallas and drove a total of 650 miles in 12 hours.
What we saw:
Severe Storms – 1
Tor-warned Storms – 0
Tornadoes – 0
